About Me

I was born in march 1968 in a small village in Hertfordshire, just north of London. My father
was English (English father Irish mother) and my mother is Welsh.
When I was 2 months old the family moved to the Lebanon. I had some very good times there.
We left due to the war in a convoy that was miles long and travelled by road from Beirut to
Damascus in an 8 hour journey on the 4th of July 1976.
Since then i have lived in Croydon then various parts of Mid Sussex where I now live.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Of Energy reviews.

The government is about to publish an energy review. Clearly someone did not like what was in the last one, and in the time honored tradition ordered a re review so that this time it could be "got right".

The Conservative party is also doing an energy review, and they have just published their interim findings.

There is a "video" of Alan Duncan and Oliver Letwin, making a presentation, It seems very earnest and remarkably unspun which is nice. (It did however remind me of the very earnest Mr Michael Foot).

What I thought was interesting, a piece of information I had forgotten was that when the Conservatives privatised and de regulated the electricity sector it had a scheme of capacity payments to make sure there was extra generating capacity available should we hit a very cold spell, get a good world cup run or what ever circumstances cause large peaks in demand for a short period of time.

This government abolished it on entering office. The net result is that now if there is a peak in demand large industrial customers have to turn things off, making manufacturing more difficult in this country. Absolute madness.

Anyway, we will of course bring capacity payments back in when we gain power.

The thing that really bothers me is that this government clearly fiddles with things with out understanding why they are there, and so can have no long term idea of what the consequences of its actions are going to be.